When you introduce your pup to a crate, you are simply getting the pup used to it, not “socializing” it on or to the crate.

Lately I have been reading and hearing more and more hunting dog people referring to an enthusiastic dog as having a high "prey drive." I have received it in email questions on behavior so many times that I felt I should look into it.

The term came into use about 10 years ago when I first heard it being pandered about by obedience trainers. Now it has found its way into all the dog sports. It has been used by fly ball enthusiasts, the agility folks, guard dog trainers, search and rescue dog trainers, and even recently by police K-9 division handlers.

It used to be that the word "drive" alone was used to describe an enthusiastic dog. But "prey drive" has that "I'm so with it" ring, so much more knowledgeable, so wolf behavior-like. In reality, the term is behaviorally nonsensical.

Technically defined, "drive" is a postulated intervening variable to help explain why an animal's response to a given stimulus will vary when all apparent conditions are constant. It is a term used by ethologists (people who study animal behavior in the natural setting) to describe an internal physiological/neurological condition that alters an animal's readiness to respond and variation in the intensity/duration of that response.

The term "drive" was introduced in 1918 by Robert Woodworth to present an alternative to the concept of instinct proposed 10 years earlier by William McDougal. Obviously, the concept of drive is not the newest kid on the block, having been around for more than 90 years.

Woodworth distinguished between the energizing (drive) aspects of motivation and the directing aspects of motivation. He felt primary drives resulted from body tissue needs and secondary drives were derived from learned habits. So hunger and thirst were primary drives, while keeping clean could be considered a secondary drive.

Predation could be considered as a secondary drive perhaps, but prey can never be considered as any type of drive, only an object of predation. The ethologist Konrad Lorenz had similar notions of drive when he postulated (1950) that some sort of energy, specific to one definitive activity, accumulates and is stored while the activity remains quiescent, and that energy is then consumed in the discharge of the activity.

This theory was depicted in his classic hydraulic model. Eating dry or salty food, being deprived of water for several hours and strenuous exercise all act to build up energy (drive) we can call thirst, so when presented with water (Lorenz referred to the water as a releaser for the innate behavior of drinking), an animal will drink.

Thirst subsides as the animal drinks until it finally stops, satiated, or in an ethological framework, the energy is used up. The animal will not drink again until it has enough accumulated energy or drive to again respond to water by drinking. The amount of enough energy required to again drink when presented with water is referred to as the threshold of response.